Kia Soul! — Yes! A car just brimming with punctuation!

Gotta hand it to those marketing folks. Kia, the big Korean auto maker that is quickly gobbling up the market niche that used to be exclusive to the Japanese, has come up with a new wrinkle: put an exclamation point after the car’s name — it’s the Kia Soul! — and see what happens.

What happens is that people like me, who deal in punctuation on a more or less regular basis, take note of it. We scratch our proverbial chins and realize that Kia has caught our attention. And that is a laudable goal, given the dozens of cars that cry for attention nearly every day.

The Kia Soul (enough, already, with the bang — that’s newsroom slang for an exclamation point) — is a quirky, pretty well-designed sub-compact along the lines of the Toyota Matrix/Pontiac Vibe, Honda Fit, Chevy HHR, Suzuki SX4 and Scion (xD or xB).

A little quirky-looking, the Kia Soul!, but a car with points. Exclamation points. (Kia Motors)

It’s a highly competitive market for these cars in the roughly $13,000 to $18,000 range, depending on the options and trim lines. The Kia Soul, a five-door hatchback, starts off with the base Soul (with a 1.6-liter, 122-horsepower four-banger), then moves up through three other versions (all with a two-liter, 142-horse four-banger) — Soul + (yes, more punctuation, this time a plus sign); Soul! (aka Soul Exclaim) and Soul Sport. All but the base model come with standard electronic stability control.

We had the Exclaim, dressed in a sort of cream-colored paint with cloth seats, and here we have to tell you about the interior — the tops of the otherwise black seats have a houndstooth check pattern. You’d think it be off putting, jarring, but it’s not. It actually works with the otherwise plain interior.

There are all the usual mod cons sprinkled around the place — redundant sound controls on the steering wheel, all electric windows (you’d think they would do all-power-down instead of just the driver’s window; it can’t cost that much more), sliding sunroof. But the piece de resistance is what Kia calls the “advanced lighting speaker.”

Just in case the music is not enough, some light to clear things up. (Kia Motors)

Switch to “mood” and you get different shades of light in the front door speakers. Switch to “music” and the light kind of pulses high to low to high to low, depending on the type of music. It’s not clear, what, exactly, the point of all this is, but it’s diverting. The problem would be if it’s so distracting that you pay more attention to the burbling light than you do to the road.

Speaking of which, when the Kia Soul is on the road it has that perky small car ride and feel — it bounces! (see, we can use punctuation, too) over the bumps and it’s not Lexus-quiet inside. But it does get up to speed and it does move down the highway at the same speed as those Lexi, even if it sounds as if the Soul is laboring a bit, or at least starting to breathe hard.

The seats are pretty comfortable and there really is room for five people, even if the ones in back will get to know each other well if they’re on a long journey.

The main thing about this car, however, is that it’s different from the rest of the pack and that is not a bad thing. The gimmicks — the glowing speakers, the spunky name — are just that. Gimmicks. But the rest of the car seems to work. It gets good gas mileage (in the 24 to 30 mpg) range, it’s not expensive to buy. Awright!